14,000 GIS users converge on San Diego, California’s Convention Center. This event is massive! One Plenary Session today led by the president of ESRI, Jack Dangermond. The topic of today’s talks – GIS: Geography in Action. Jack began this morning with a welcome and proceeded with some yearly awards. Next, began the showcase of technical demonstrations. One of the best demonstrations I’ve ever seen was given by MIT and their use of 3D modeling to map out the entire campus, including each room of every building by use. Then analyzed the data to show the impact of transportation upgrades in proximity to sensitive labs.

For the first time ever, ESRI demonstrated a preview of ArcGIS 9.4! The user interface looks like it may borrow some styling and functional cues from Bentley’s WaterCAD with dockable and pinable windows (the TOC for example). The editing interface looks like it will be greatly improved, removing the “target layer” and introducing a type of “legend” of features to pick from which determines the features you are creating or modifying. The tag line for that demonstration ended up being, “editing is as easy as drawing on a map”.

The final speaker for the plenary session was Dr. Peter Raven of the Missouri Botanical Gardens on Biodiversity – The Foundation of Life. His talk was very moving, encouraging each GIS user to imagine the world as they would like it to be and strive in daily life to make the world as close to that dream as possible. Dr. Raven congratulated ESRI on its efforts to promote GIS in early education. While he never mentioned this phrase, it resonated with me throughout the entire speech, “Think globally, act locally.”

Finally, the Map Gallery… Hundreds of submissions this year for public display.

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2. 2008 ESRI Developer Summit (DevSummit)
3. 2008 ESRI SouthEast Region Users Conference (SERUG) Announced
4. Make Better Maps with help from the ESRI Mapping Center
5. ESRI Releases a ‘How to Understand the ELA’ White Paper